LG GW620 Eve/Etna FW Upgrade Tutorial

Not too long ago I got an LG EVE device. If you are curious it’s an Android device from LG.

It’s amazing how LG have the special ability to take anything, from the poorest tools to the best OS I’ve seen and shred it to pieces…

What do I mean you might ask ? Well first of all the home screen Can be customized to be LG home screen, Or Orange home screen or Android home screen, this sounds nice, but I think all Android devices should have common interface and look and feel especially to the home screen since this is what you guys, as users will learn to know and love.

Second, like Samsung in the GLAXY device, the neglected the DPI definition, if you try to get the X and Y DPI you’ll discover them to be 160 average, the default…. Since the pixels width and height in the API are right (320×480) than most likely they did not update the screen’s size in inches in their FW. I also experienced crashes when the device was connected\disconnected from the USB cable, when I say crash I mean black screen with ARM registers displayed and you can only take off the battery to restart… you know… crash

Sooooo I went on to flash it with a new FW I got from Orange.

You think that was easy ? nooooop why would it, it was soo easy on HTC, and they do need to compete with them…

First of all the installation instructions are fairly unclear.

Basically what you need to do is:

Install the USB\MODEM drivers that come as exe file (LGUSBModemDriver_WHQL_ML_Ver_4.9.4_All.exe)
Restart the PC.
Start the phone and turn debug mode on.
Unzip the drivers library, you should have two : android_usb_windows and qualcomm_composite_driver where the second dir will contain most drivers you need for the FW upgrade and misc operations and the first one will contain the ADB drivers to debug and install Android apps on the phone.
Make sure the device debug mode is on.
Plug in the device to the USB.
When you are asked for drivers by XP don’t let if find on it’s own, tell him you’ll find it alone, and when you get a list of all known devices to windows choose ‘have disk’ and browse to where you unzipped the drivers directory, the first 2 drivers I think are serial drivers so they need the second dir, the third driver needs to be the ADB so you’ll have to redirect to the Android drivers dir.

GW620 driver’s installation.

Now comes the tricky part…
Disconnect the UDB from the device and turn off the USB debug mode on the device, then plug in again.
You will have several OTHER serial drivers discovered.
Open the flash tool given by LG than go to ‘tools->NV Backup’
Press on the connect and than let it find the serial port and start the NV Backup, if the backup fail, try on another PC, I had to move to another PC cause my was malfunctioning from soo many drivers I tried in the past from LG.
Ok, so basically now you have to take out the battery return it press on ‘1’ and re-plug the device to get it into ‘emergency mode’
Here I also got stuck, I got every few seconds ‘unknow USB device’ message coming and going, but no ‘emergency mode’.
The magic, as far as my experience with it goes is to open the device, change the USB debug mode to on, then off again, then unplug the device and extract the battery, put back in and do the ‘1’ key + USB insertion. Than you’ll really find yourself in emergency mode.
The rest is like their instructions were.
So for conclusions, if I had to wait for Orange or LG to help me flush, the device would never get to the market on time, that’s because of LG great awareness for the programmers out there.

If you are a programmer that needed the FW upgrade I hope the article finds you on time (and finds u well… )